It took me 14 years to write poems about Vietnam. I had never thought about writing about it, and in a way I had been systematically writing around it.
Yusef KomunyakaaPoets are seen as the caretakers of language, so working with words no matter what the form is what we do.
Yusef KomunyakaaThrough the years I have seen myself as a peaceful person, but the awareness of the anger is part of that process.
Yusef KomunyakaaStudents often have such a lofty idea of what a poem is, and I want them to realize that their own lives are where the poetry comes from. The most important things are to respect the language; to know the classical rules, even if only to break them; and to be prepared to edit, to revise, to shape.
Yusef Komunyakaa